Important Mountains in New Jersey

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New Jersey has its cities and urban-industrial sprawl, but the state also encompasses wilder terrain, from the flatwoods of the Pine Barrens to pockets of swamp wilderness. Its most significant terrain comes in the form of summits, ridges and plateaus in the northern parts of the state, country belonging to various provinces of the Appalachians, including the Valley-and-Ridge, Piedmont and New York-New Jersey Highlands.

Kittatinny Mountain

This linear uplift is one of the major ridges of New Jersey's portion of the Valley-and-Ridge province of the Appalachians. The Delaware River notably cleaves it at the Delaware Water Gap on the New Jersey-Pennsylvania line. The ridge itself is comprised of the sandstone and conglomerate of the Shawangunk Formation, a Paleozoic layer uplifted from old river sediments some 290 million years ago. A river ancestral to the Delaware likely carved the gap by eroding headward from its source, eventually breaching Kittatinny Mountain and capturing a stream northwest of it. Today the Gap stretches a mile between its gateway summits along the Kittatinny ridge, 1,463-foot Mount Minsi in Pennsylvania and 1,527-foot Mount Tammany in New Jersey.

Ramapo Mountains

East of Kittatinny, the Ramapo Mountains form the eastern scarp of the New Jersey Highlands, rearing around 500 to 1,000 feet from the Newark Basin. The juncture owes its sharpness to the Ramapo Fault. These heavily forested hills conceal lakes and waterfalls, as well as healthy populations of white-tailed deer and black bear.

Watchung Mountains

Igneous rock stemming from the dissolution of Pangaea, the supercontinent whose formation helped give rise to the Appalachians, forms the parallel ridges of the Watchung Mountains, along with interbedded sedimentary layers. The name stems from a Lenape Indian word for "high hills." Most prominent are the First and Second Watchung mountains, with their sheer southeastern faces and gentle northwestward slopes. One of the region's most important wetland complexes, the Great Swamp, is partly hemmed in by another spine of the Watchungs.

Visiting

Public and otherwise accessible lands give the visitor a chance to deeply explore New Jersey's highlands. The Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area includes the eponymous gorge through Kittatinny Mountain, with plenty of hiking and boating opportunities managed by the National Park Service. Various parks and refuges dot the Ramapo Mountains, including the 4,268-acre Ramapo Mountain State Forest. The Nature Conservancy and Wayne Township help manage the High Mountain Park Preserve in the Watchung Mountains, which includes extensive Piedmont forests and a rare traprock glade ecosystem, not to mention a stellar view of New York City.

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About the Author

Ethan Shaw is a writer and naturalist living in Oregon. He has written extensively on outdoor recreation, ecology and earth science for outlets such as Backpacker Magazine, the Bureau of Land Management and Atlas Obscura. Shaw holds a Bachelor of Science in wildlife ecology and a graduate certificate in geographic information systems from the University of Wisconsin.